Oracle Online

As far as computer science goes, a few friends of mine got me into building my own computer a couple of years ago, and I’ve been fooling around with computers and digital editing ever since. I know it sounds nerdy, but I really enjoy doing it. I have three computers just in my dorm room, and I work with them at work, too.

Right now I’m in the process of editing my own full-length film. There’s actually talk of it being shown at the Forest Lake 5 Theatre. The film is called Elemental Forces. It’s a trilogy about the human race becoming so powerful that they create an apocalypse. Only a few survive, and these survivors remained sheltered from the rest of the world. The new world, which during the film is in its medieval stages, is eventually introduced to the technology that the apocalypse survivors had been hiding. But that doesn’t happen until the end of the third film.

I worked on editing the movie for about eight hours every day over the summer, and I put in about an hour each day now. My friend John (the director of the film) and I thought that a community project of this size would be great, and it is. We’ve spent a lot of money, which all comes out of our own pockets, but we’re hoping we’ll be reimbursed for some of it after it’s released.

O: What kind if editing did the film require?

JK: Since we don’t have a lot of the things we need, like catapults, wizards, and armies of thousands, I do a lot of digital 3D modeling. I create everything from scratch, then animate it and hope it looks real.

O: What do you do when you’re not editing or studying biology?

JK: I’ve been going to classes, working at ITS, and training for Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth. I run for at least an hour a day. I ran the marathon last year, and it was physically the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. It was so rewarding. I’ve always loved long-distance running, and I knew that a marathon is something runners always strive for. It was important to me that I did it. A few friends and I started training every day for the few months before the race. When we got there, the farthest we had ever run was 20 miles. We figured we’d let the race just be a surprise, and it definitely was. I lost all feeling somewhere around mile 17 and just, I don’t even know. There’s just nothing like it.

O: How did you do?

JK: I ended up finishing in the top 10 percent of the race with a time of three hours and 22 minutes, so I was definitely happy with how I performed. I just really wanted to see how far I could push myself.
There was a sea of 7,000 people surrounding my friends and me. It was like the excitement of every race I’d ever been in was all rolled into this one big one. I started toward the back, so I was passing people the whole time. There’s nothing more reassuring than passing people by. When it was over, I fell asleep on a curb with an ice-cream cone in my hand. The nice ice-cream man woke me up and asked me if I was okay [laughs].